domingo, diciembre 16, 2012

CIA's most famous operative is a secret star

Editor's note: Howard Kurtz is the host of CNN's "Reliable Sources" and is Newsweek's Washington bureau chief. He is also a contributor to the website Daily Download.

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(CNN) -- Maya is about to become the most famous CIA operative since Valerie Plame.

Except that's not her real name. We're not allowed to know her real name. Maya is the name of her character in the film "Zero Dark Thirty", which is already generating controversy for its depiction of the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

This has an only-in-Washington feel, a collision between our celebrity culture and the need to protect our spies from having their identities exposed. So the operative somehow becomes a movie star (played by Jessica Chastain) while remaining in the shadows.

Howard Kurtz

Perhaps inevitably, questions are mounting about the CIA employee, her personality and her contacts with the filmmakers. And she can't properly defend herself because she's not allowed to talk to the press.

Thus it was that the Washington Post ran a highly unusual front-page profile of someone whose name is unknown. The woman was passed over for a promotion, the story says, and is an abrasive sort who e-mailed colleagues saying they didn't deserve to share in a prestigious award she received for her role in the mission. (By the way, what does it take to get a government promotion if helping eliminate the world's top terrorist doesn't qualify?)

"You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother" - Albert Einstein

"It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office" - H. L. Menken

"I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented" -Elie Wiesel

"Stay hungry, stay foolish" - Steve Jobs

"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert , in five years ther'ed be a shortage of sand" - Milton Friedman

"The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less" - Vaclav Havel